Organizations understand that merely hiring lot of employees doesn’t help them streamline their business operations; people don’t fit the job profile precisely. They need training to strengthen the requisite skills and learn new ones. Training and development ads essence to the newly acquired employees, it helps them to learn new skills, sharpen skills already known to them, perform better and increase productivity. Some employees outshine post training and become leaders. Since a company is the sum total of what employees achieve individually, organizations should do everything in their control to ensure that employees perform at their peak; their desire and ability to push beyond their level helps give peak performance.

Training and development helps companies gain and retain top talent, it increase job satisfaction and morale, and training improves productivity and earn more profit. Additionally, training helps employees to increase their productivity.

Some of the common types of training programs are as follows:

Orientation training

Provides the new employee with brief and accurate information to make him/her more comfortable in the job. The training programme encourages employee confidence and helps the new employee adapt faster to the job. New employees grasp SOPs more effectively. A good orientation programme helps retain workforce.

On-board training

On-board training is about integrating with the other employees, management, and the corporate culture.

Technical skills training

Technical Training teaches the skills needed to design, develop, implement, maintain, support or operate a particular technology or related application, product or service.

Soft-skills training

Soft Skills training focuses on identifying employee strengths and weaknesses and how to use them to project a positive as well as confident image. This leads to employee’s better success both in the personal and professional aspects of life.

Product or service training

Product knowledge is a skill where your employees fully understand and can effectively communicate with customers about your product, its features, benefits, uses, and support needs. Product knowledge is most important for all employees of an organization.

Compliance training

Compliance training refers to the process of educating employees on laws, regulations and company policies that apply to their day-to-day job responsibilities.

Franchise training

The goals of any good franchise system are to achieve consistent, sustainable replication of their brand promise to consumers, and for the franchise system to be financially successful at every level. Training is a major component of achieving that goal.

Managerial and leadership training

Leadership and management training programs courses are specialized programs designed to help the employees to learn new leadership techniques and refine old skills to run their team with newness, including assertive communication, motivation methods, and coaching.

ADDIE Model

One of the most used model of training and development is the ADDIE Model of instruction systems design was first developed for the U.S. Army during the 1970s at Florida State University’s Centre for Educational Technology, and it was later adapted for use by all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. The model has become a widely used and frequently modified practice within the private sector, especially for compliance training and learning events that are not time-sensitive. The biggest attraction of the ADDIE Model is its flexibility; it can be used with both individualized and traditional instructions. In addition, its phases are frequently modified to suit user needs, and it can be used in combination with other models.

ADDIE is an acronym for the five phases of this approach to courseware development:

Analysis

Training Need Analysis is the process in which the company identifies training and development needs of its employees so that they can do their job effectively. It involves a complete analysis of training needs required at various levels of the organisation. The HR department with the training professional identifies and details the instructional challenge of the course, the learning objectives and issues such as learner skill level.

Design

Designing a training program involves a series of steps from identifying the learning objectives, course output, determining the training content, deciding the methodologies, selecting the learning activities, defining evaluation criteria and to specifying follow-up activities. The training professional addresses a variety of concerns to achieve optimal courseware design and systematic program development. These factors include learning objectives, content, assessment instruments, exercises, subject matter analysis, lesson planning and media.

Development

The training professional creates the content following the design several phase blueprint. It includes storyboards and graphics, as well as the integration of e-learning technologies etc. Organizations like ICICI bank in association with Sikkim Manipal University have designed tailor-made management courses that bring out an overall development in a fresh graduate employee. These training are designed for the right fit-out for a job, post-training, to a specific organizational culture, practices, processes, overall grooming and management.

Implementation

Many organizations have extensive training programs that cover all aspects of hard and soft skills. These trainings are conducted in such a way that employees get a mandatory number of hours of training every quarter or year. This is done to ensure that employees are enabled to perform their job duties according to their potential. The phase of implementation focuses on developing procedures for training both the facilitators and the learners. Facilitator training should explain the curriculum, learning outcomes, method of delivery and testing procedures.

Evaluation

The evaluation phase is a continuous process throughout the design process. Its purpose is to ensure that all learning goals will meet the specified business needs. The training professional also identifies on-the-job performance goals and ensures that business needs are met. Evaluation provides feedback to help you identify if your training achieved your intended outcomes, and helps you make decisions about future trainings.

Organizations such as AT&T, Amazon, GE, P&G, HUL, Infosys, Capgemini emphasize on training and development programs continuously. 

AT&T helps millions around the globe connect with entertainment, mobile, high-speed Internet and voice services. Their locations hiring is U.S. They have more than 280,000 employees worldwide. AT&T University is an executive-led program which focuses on leadership and management development training programme housed at their Dallas headquarters, with satellite campuses across the U.S. In partnership with Georgia Tech and Udacity Inc. AT&T has helped create the first-ever Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMS CS) degree and partnered with Udacity to create and launch several self-paced, fast-track technical credentials called Nanodegrees across web and mobile development, data analytics and tech entrepreneurship, with more programs to come.

Why the company offers a rigorous training programme? The reason is the company does not believe in just hiring and the traditional educational system as sources for reconstructing or finding new talent. The company needs employees who are ready to work in a competitive and more digital world. AT&T believes in aligning company leaders to strategic business innovation and results, skilling and reskilling their 280,000 employees and inspiring a culture of continuous learning. The company looks out for people who are enthusiastic about technology and innovation and have excellent communication and customer service skills. They seek people who can thrive in a fast-paced, diverse work environment and who have a commitment to the very highest standards of honesty, integrity and respect.

Amazon hires people who are obsessed to give the customers best of services, people who have passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence and long-term thinking. They hire people worldwide and they have 245,200 employees worldwide.

Amazon gives their newly acquired employees an intensive, month-long training and leadership program prior to hire. Amazon prepays 95% of tuition for employees at fulfilment centres to take courses in in-demand fields. A “Virtual Contact Centre” trains employees to work from home.

Why the company offers this training? They prepare their employees to own the company from day one, that’s the reason they train them to take ownership over products and services that impact millions of customers. This helps them pioneer a career at Amazon.

Capgemini is a highly employee-centric organisation, they believe in nurturing the employees throughout their career with the company, since the time they are hired. They prepare the employees to compete in a highly competitive marketplace that is driven by ever-changing technological innovation. They practice initiatives such as Group Learning & Development (Group L&D) to prepare employees to be sensitive to their clients’ business needs. Other programs include training fresh hires in emerging tech such as data analytics, where they have collaborated with universities. 

Infosys has power programmes to up skill their employees. It was one of the first companies to offer a hike if the employees re-skilled in emerging technology. Its bridge programmes skill young talents who have spent a minimum of three years in the organisation to get trained in areas such as consulting, full-stack development (a full stack web developer is a person who can develop both client and server software. In addition to mastering HTML and CSS, he/she also knows power programming), tech architecture and more. The aim is to provide employees with alternate career growth instead of them leaving organisations for further studies. It had offered a salary rise by 80-120% to those who up skilled. 

Conclusion

Why is training so important? Why organizations invest in it? What type of behavioural changes is desired post training? Whom to train? Which area? When to train?  Where to train? How to train? The core of training plan needs lot of thinking before implementation.

Higher education tops the agenda of almost all nations in the world. India has the third largest higher education system in the world, next only to China and the United States.  India possesses a highly developed higher education system which offers facility of education and training in almost all aspects of human creative and intellectual endeavors: arts and humanities; natural, mathematical and social sciences, engineering, medicine, dentistry, agriculture, education, law, commerce, management, music, and performing arts. We are also strong in national and foreign languages, culture, communications etc.  The scope of higher education is generally measured by enrolment ratio in higher education. It is growing robustly in our country.

Learning is an internal process which depends on the situation. Every individual has his own style of grasping and internalizing the knowledge. Learning involves set of activities and events. Grasping of information is recurring; it has measures such as comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation etc.

To provide a more intricate and rich learning background it is becoming increasingly common to find ‘problem solving learning’ being adopted in higher education, especially in technical subjects.  It is dominated by the condition of problems, design, decision or construction and is characteristically based on highly specified format. Resources such as case studies, live assignments, brain storming sessions, enactment of situation, live cases etc are the pedagogical tools in the class rooms. The students are assigned practical problems in which they are supposed to analyze content, and formulate plans or solutions according to specified methods. Obviously, in this approach there is a solo ‘correct’ or ‘best’ result against which student responses are measured or assessed. Problem-solving learning can be seen as a method to encourage students to apply their knowledge more deeply to ‘far problems’ where the subject matter has not been directly covered in lectures. This form of learning is slowly shaping up in good institutions. One important aspect of any problem is that it is open-ended and it does not have only one solution; a problem can be solved in various manners.

When students are given problem solving, they research the information and the nature of the problem and during their presentations solutions come in leaps and bounds in a class. Typically when a mature teacher discusses a problem asking students to come out with solutions the teacher needs to be patient with each student’s or group’s resolution; since each one has a unique reason for the solution presented. Learning focuses on an authentic or realistic problem that promotes differing perspectives. Also, learning arises from the personal interpretation of ideas and experiences. This presents democratization of knowledge from the sharing of facts and conception; this offers the advantages of engaging in discussion, debating, questioning, and answering; one gets to hear so many perspectives of a topic. Problem solving learning encourages investigative instincts in students and a lot of experimentation. Students generate own problem-solving activities, rather than those defined by the tutor; this automatically boosts their confidence.

In problem solving learning two elements contribute to one’s learning approach: solution and implementation. In problem solving learning the teacher becomes the facilitator to provide resources and guides students as they develop content; therefore, experience and dexterity of teacher matters. The teacher needs to get involved along with the students. In such sessions a passionate motivator is required; one who can encourage students to go deep down to the root of a problem, find causes and effects and then get solutions. Selection criteria of teachers in higher education therefore should be made more rigorous. Exposure of the teacher to reality, industry experience, skill sets, aptitude, language skill, imaginativeness, analytical skills, and most important the teacher’s compassion towards the growth and success of student matters a lot. Where are such teachers?

An important piece of advice to all teachers who adopt problem solving learning – how they treat their students toward failure; as there cannot be only one solution to a problem, but many and one among the many solutions is the right solution if implemented productively. I want to mention here the Bollywood film – ‘3 Idiots’ by Rajkumar Hirani, in which he has highlighted the education system in our country with its focal point on results (grades) rather than love for learning. We are so obsessed with exams and results – real learning goes for a toss. Exam-centric learning pulls down the spirit of a learner because this system tends to foster a fear toward failure that kills innovation. Both, teacher and student need to adopt a healthy approach towards failure with the right attitude and harnessing it as a blessing not a nuisance. Today, if more and more teachers adopt this pedagogy, we would create so many innovations and in turn several entrepreneurs!

While we boast of being a young nation (50% population below 25 years) we need young minds daring to go ahead, establishing ventures. Not the ‘me too’ crowd. I am sure teachers can do wonders in the class room; let us all encourage our students to start their enterprises; guide them to be entrepreneurs and not supervisors, let us create a breed of youngsters those who don’t shy away from failures.  Let’s take a call as teachers, mentors, parents on how many good ideas and innovations we kill or pluck in the budding stage itself by ridiculing the initial failures. In fact failures are not bad, they can be exciting. Most of the inventions in the world have initially been failures and from them emerge those valuable gold nuggets.

Let me share with all dear teachers, the problem solving learning gives us teachers and our students the “oh, aha” moments of impending success which guide us towards next innovation.